Bieber Fever: the gig that never happened

Posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Entertainment Installations often supply staging for Channel 7’s Sunrise gigs in Martin Place and usually everything goes smoothly. Not so when the teen pop sensation Justin Bieber hit Sydney. Firstly, the gig was moved to the Overseas Passenger Terminal over crowd safety fears but even that didn’t work out.

Neale Mace, Entertainment Installation’s managing director, arrived with his crew for load in at the ungodly hour of 1am to find 3,000 screaming, hormonally-charged young girls working themselves into a frenzy.

”At 3am while we were still setting up they broke through the barriers and stampeded the stage,” Neale told. “By 4.30am there were about 8000 fans screaming and surging towards the stage. Every time we’d turn on a light or a LC Panel, they all screamed and pushed forward. The police asked us not to flash any lights or LC Panels until they had made a call as to whether the gig would go ahead due to crowd safety concerns.

“After they called the gig off around 4.30am, the crowd didn’t move…. they all just stayed there screaming for Justin.”

Neale is not sure if his rig of 8 x Martin LC Panels, Arkaos Media Server, 32 x Kupo MultiPars and a MA2 Lite had anything to do with the mayhem – but he likes to think so…..